Mr. Do!
Another White Gleeb Mr. Do!
I forgot I had bookmarked this website in the middle of September. Chattanooga Pinball in Nashville Chattanooga, TN has an image gallery showing that they own what looks like a couple of Universal Mr. Do!’s. The gallery shows two Mr. Do!’s, the original version and what I believe is the “white” sideart Gleeb manufactured version of Mr. Do!.
I had kind of forgot that I saw this white sideart Mr. Do!, because Chattanooga’s prices on games are quite steep. $750 for this white Mr. Do! Yeah… I don’t think so. Plus, part of me doesn’t believe that they actually have this version of Mr. Do! with the smaller sticker sideart, that they stole this image from somewhere else. But, I am sure at some point we’ll be down that way, Nashville isn’t too far from Indianapolis, so I’ll have to plan some arcade coin-op sidetracking when we’re in that southern area again.
But, if this was a true white Mr. Do!, then this would be the fourth one I have seen.
If there are any arcade collectors in Chattanooga or Nashville that could help me out, that would be great. Whether you could stop by Chattanooga Pinball and see if they actually have the white Mr. Do!, or if you know someone personally in the company that could vouch whether the stock on the website is up to date. Eventually I will give them a call and see for myself, but knowing I won’t buy the Mr. Do! for that price might make my conversion difficult.
Update August 26, 2008
Curious what you might find inside of Chattanooga Pinball’s warehouse of arcade games? Here is a video on You Tube of a walk around at the Tennessee location. The original author of this video did a terrible job filming this video, even for an amateur, racing through the rows and not really giving us a sense for most of the games / condition of what was there. But, you can see that most of the arcade games, if you can call them that, are empty shells with the parts sold off.
I didn’t see the white Mr. Do! I thought I might have towards the beginning with the Congorilla, but like I assumed, the Chattanooga Pinball website is more than likely extremely out of date and does not at all use real photos of the machines in the warehouse.
White Mr. Do! with Sideart for Sale!
Late last week, an arcade collecting contact pointed out to me that another collector had a white Mr. Do! with the sideart, the one I have conveted for over a year now, was up for sale. Not to mention, this Do! was cheap cheap. Only $200. Check out the photos.
I couldn’t believe how great of condition the classic game is in. It’s like this white Mr. Do! was different than the others ones, because the artwork on the side had little to no flaking.
I thought briefly that this Mr. Do! machine was the one that Mark Deroller once owned. It had some ruboff on the side artwork of the machine, where you would place your left hand when playing the game. I also knew how far about Mark was in MA area to the current owner, and the current owner had posted total mileage each year he traveled to add to his arcade game collection. But, then I noticed the Mr. Do! control panel was different between the two different white machines. So, this makes it official that I have now seen three “white” Mr. Do!’s with sideart, possibly all made by Gleeb.
Only catch, the coin-op collector who owns it is all the way across the United States. I started to check into UShip, which is pretty cool, but it didn’t appear that even at such a low price I would be able to get the Mr. Do.
I told my fellow collector who turned me onto the Do! that we had to do something about it. He is within two hours of the game, and I have emailed the owner in the past about other arcade games. At the very least I was hoping he could make a deal to get out there and scan the Mr. Do! sideart.
But as of right now, he is considering the idea of just outright buying the Mr. Do! Watch here for updates…
Former CEO of Universal & Mr. Do!
Before we went to Michigan the first weekend of November, there was a post in the Klov forums about the versions of Mr. Do! I had mentioned one member had a couple of email exchanges with the former CEO of Universal, the company that made Mr. Do!
I emailed that member this week (shacklefurd), another coin-operated arcade game collector in Indiana. He emailed me back saying he wasn’t sure he still had the email address for the former Universal Games CEO, but he would check.
Here’s crossing my fingers. How cool would it be to find the company that made the Mr. Do! with white sideart and in finding that company discover that some of their former employees still have some of the white Mr. Do!’s in great condition. No sideart flaking at all. I can dream:)
If Shacklefurd doesn’t still have the email address for the former CEO, does anyone else have any leads? This Mr. Do! is becoming a little bit of my collecting grail. Shoot me an email if you can help me with any information about Gleeb or Universal.
Update – 4.15.09
Wow! Quite a bit of time has passed on this one. But, Jason S. was able to track down an email and more importantly a name for the former CEO of Universal and apparently he worked with other companies such as Exidy and Data East among others.
The original email he had bounced, and the new email I found got rejected, so I am going to keep digging. But I hope to finally find some answers to the white Mr. Do! character artwork license, possibly to a company on the east coast.
Mr. Do! History Topic on KLOV
Interesting topic going on right now on the klov forums. One user was looking at the Mr. Do! entry on klov.com, and wondering which of the three versions there was the original dedicated. The correct answer is that there is more than one Mr. Do! that is “factory” dedicated, but only one directly from Universal.
Here is an exerpt from one user;
The other “dedicated” units were done by ops who wanted the games to look as good as possible. I have an old Play Meter article that talks about a lot of vending companies going out of their way to make Mr. Do! kits look like dedicated games… some even making cabinets just for them.
Lost in the collecting world is the fact that, in 1983, Mr. Do! was one of the biggest hits. 7th highest earning game that year, meaning only 6 dedicated games in 1983 out-earned Do!. 30,000 legal Mr. Do! kits were sold, roughly 10 times more than most Golden Tee kits sold nowadays. Only about 2,000 dedicated Do’s were sold.
Opinion or not, pretty interesting information of how many Universal Mr. Do! units were sold vs. conversion kits. Even more interesting is a quote from another member here in Indiana (Shacklefurd) that actually investigated into my coveted White Mr. Do! cabinet with clown artwork;
A had series of E-mails with the former CEO of universal from the 80’s a while back and here is what he said. The white one with the red yellow and orange strips came from Japan. The wood grain and the white with the clown side art were factory built by smaller companies on the east and west coast that bought the rights to release Mr. Do and other Universal games. So they are all “Dedicated”, but the Universal from Japan is the one collectors think of as dedicated.
I should get in touch with Shackle and see if he has the CEO’s information still and try to track down the company that made the White Mr. Do!
Until this forum thread surfaced, I had posted here that I was thinking it was a company by the name of Gleeb who made the cabinets and that Gleeb was also based out of Japan, not here in the USA.
Update: July 2013 I now have photos from inside two different Ladybug machines, machines that have very similar painted illustrated artwork to the white Mr. Do!, that show Universal serial numbers. Check out this post on two different factory Mr. Do!s.
Final cherries for rare white Mr. Do! bezel
I got the photos for the final Mr. Do! bezel cherries late last week, and I traced the artwork in Illustrator tonight and added them into the original bezel. I am really pumped that I am finally finished with the Mr. Do! bezel and can focus on finding other examples of this machine.
Thanks to Bruce for the final photos of his prized rare white Mr. Do!.
Updates on Mr. Do! leads
I finally heard back from Mark Deroller, and after a lot of searching through years of past emails, he can’t find contact information for the people that bought his Mr. Do! over five years ago. So as of right now, I consider that white Mr. Do! lead dead. I am back to looking through links of arcade collectors sites, hoping to find a collector who has a website with photos of this Mr. Do! that hasn’t made a predominant profile on one of the major coin-op collecting databasing sites.
As for the white Mr. Do! that Rob Carroll auctioned on ebay, the buyer finally came and picked it up. His name is Bruce Kubu, and I have gotten his contact information from Rob. Bruce and I have been in touch, and after a couple of follow ups, he sent me some photos of the remaining Mr. Do! cherries at the top of the curve of the bezel, the last piece I was missing. I hope to trace that before the week is up, and finally finish the white Mr. Do! bezel nearly 5 months after I started piecing it together.
So what is next in finding out more about the rare white Mr. Do! with sideart? I am not sure. Wait for an ebay auction of the machine to pop up? Check with Walt Glassett again to see if he has any leads? Call Universal Games directly to see if I can track down exactly what Gleeb was? I don’t know. I will cross that bridge when I get to it, and I get the motivation.
Mr. Do Illustrated Sideart History
Mr. Do is quite a popular, classic game. Play it once and you will be hooked. For that reason, it appears that any original versions of this game are hard to come by. The popularity of the game drove it to have one of the most popular and successful conversion kits ever made and as a result, most of the Mr. Do games you come across and conversions. I have seen a ton of them in the cabinets with the presidential wood siding venire. They have everything, the marquee, the control panel artwork, but they have nothing on the sides, which, for a guy who loves sideart is really disappointing.
Here’s a little other bit about the game’s history. Apparently even what I thought was the original cabinet from Universal, isn’t even true. If this is even true (skeptical) the original Mr. Do had a black joystick, and came from Japan. Most of the common ones were made by Universal in a very similar looking cabinet, but were actually conversions from another game called Lady Bug, and had an orange joystick. Therefore the true-true original Mr. Do’s out there are even that much more scarce. Check out photos below of the most familiar Mr. Do cabinet.
Which brings me to the “White Sideart” version. I found out about this version / artwork in October of 2006. A friend of mine forwarded me an auction on ebay for a Mr. Do with some strange artwork on the side that I had never seen before. I didn’t think much of it, kept an eye on it, but it was about in Mass., so that would be quite a distance for this game.
Now, like I mentioned above, there were some conversion kits out there, possibly for both versions of the game, the white sideart and the regular version that most commonly had the green marquee. Some of the white conversion kits were more thoroughly applied than others, because the kit came with sideart but finding a machine with it applied is difficult. The artwork was printed on white with Mr. Do and his enemies in a maze like pattern with the cakes and fruits from the game. It is pretty different looking but I do like sideart, and in a way, I like this just as much as the original because the original was void of any real artwork other than the red lines on the side of the cabinet.
These are the photos that I have found so far of this cabinet. They are a little more plentiful in photos then they are in finding actual owners. Right now I know of none.
Please Contact Me With Information
If you own, or know anyone who owns one of these, or just know some more of the history of this particular version, I would love to know more. I would look to buy, but that is not the main idea. Most people who have rare, or hard to find games aren’t looking to just sell.
What I am looking for, is someone who would be willing to take some hi-res photos of the different pieces of artwork so that I can trace them in Illustrator and reproduce them for my own machine, and only my own machine.
However, as of this writing in February of 2007, I haven’t found a site that has the art, or anyone who is talking this much about this one piece of artwork. If you know that to not be true, please, drop me a line.
Update: July 2013 I now have photos from inside two different Ladybug machines, machines that have very similar painted illustrated artwork to the white Mr. Do!, that show Universal serial numbers. Check out this post on two different factory Mr. Do!s.
